We argue that, in the case of research biobanks, there is a need to replace the currently used informed consent with trusted consent. Accordingly, we introduce a proposal for the structure of the latter. Further, we discuss some of the issues that can be addressed effectively through our proposal. In particular, we illustrate: i) which research should be authorized by donors; ii) how to regulate access to information; iii) the fundamental role played by a Third Party Authority in assuring compliance (...) with the reciprocal expectations and obligations of donors and scientists. Finally, we briefly analyse two issues that might represent important elements of a ‘new alliance’ between researchers and donors to which the trusted consent could pave the way: i) the correlations between needs and rights of the two parties, and ii) possible economic transactions. (shrink)

This essay places the debate between Jerome and Helvidius in the theological context of the Rome of Pope Damasus. It presents the different theological positions of Helvidius and Jerome, highlighting that the literary clash was in the first place centered on asceticism and only later on the question of the perpetual virginity of Mary. The controversy, before being dogmatic, was exegetical in nature and this could explain the absence of an official intervention by Pope Damasus. Referring mainly to the testimony (...) of Ambrosiaster, it is proved in this study that the thought of Helvidius differed from the tradition of the Church in Rome, and that even Jerome innovates with his exegetical solution to the issue of the «brethren of the Lord». (shrink)

Lo studio inquadra l’ambivalente rapporto di S. Girolamo con la filosofia antica nel contesto romano di fine IV secolo: come Ambrosiaster, anche Girolamo considera la filosofia un esercizio di dialettica e utilizza l’opposizione fra filosofi e apostoli pescatori per teorizzare uno stile umile nell’esegesi. Tuttavia, non rinunzia all’eredità della cultura classica, proponendo un uso cauto e selettivo della filosofia, attraverso la metafora della “bella prigioniera”. La filosofia è recuperata come anticipazione della vita ascetica, concepita come “vera filosofia”, e dà il (...) suo apporto all’esegesi biblica a livello metodologico e contenutistico sulla base della tripartizione in etica, fisica e logica e di uno studio fondato sulle auctoritates. Il commentatore delle Scritture è per Girolamo il vero philosophus Christi, in quanto la Scrittura è la vera sapienza da ricercare. (shrink)

The author makes an innovative reading of human rights based on the dimensions of space, time and memory, as constituent dimensions of being. To do this, he explains new coordinates in the post-human era of the globalized world.: the profound crisis of political space revealed in the State, and its..

The automated identification of national implementations of European directives by text similarity techniques has shown promising preliminary results. Previous works have proposed and utilized unsupervised lexical and semantic similarity techniques based on vector space models, latent semantic analysis and topic models. However, these techniques were evaluated on a small multilingual corpus of directives and NIMs. In this paper, we utilize word and paragraph embedding models learned by shallow neural networks from a multilingual legal corpus of European directives and national legislation (...) to develop unsupervised semantic similarity systems to identify transpositions. We evaluate these models and compare their results with the previous unsupervised methods on a multilingual test corpus of 43 Directives and their corresponding NIMs. We also develop supervised machine learning models to identify transpositions and compare their performance with different feature sets. (shrink)

Introduction: Motor evoked potentials (MEPs) to transcranial magnetic stimulation are known to be susceptible to several sources of variability. However, conflicting evidences on individual characteristics in relatively small sample sizes have been reported. We investigated the effect of age, height, and sex on MEPs of the motor cortex and spinal roots in a large cohort. Methods: A total of 587 subjects clinically and neuroradiologically intact were included. MEPs were recorded during mild tonic contraction through a circular coil applied over the (...) “hot spot” of the first dorsal interosseous and tibialis anterior muscles, bilaterally. Central motor conduction time (CMCT) was estimated as the difference between MEP cortical latency and the peripheral motor conduction time by cervical or lumbar magnetic stimulation. Peak-to-peak MEP amplitude to cortical stimulation and right-to-left difference of each parameter were also measured. Results: After Bonferroni correction, general linear (multiple) regression analysis showed that both MEP cortical latency and peripheral motor conduction time at four limbs positively correlated with age and height. At lower limbs, an independent effect of sex on the same measures was also observed (with females showing smaller values than males). CMCT correlated with both age (negatively) and height (positively) when analyzed by a single regression; however, with a multiple regression analysis this significance disappeared, due to the correction for the multicollinearity within the dataset. Conclusions: Physical individual features need to be considered for a more accurate and meaningful MEPs interpretation. Both in clinical practice and in research setting, patients and controls should be matched for age, height, and sex. (shrink)

We propose here the first translation into Portuguese of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s small treatise De Ente et Uno (1491). The translation is preceded by a brief presentation in which the work is contextualized within the scope of the thought of its young author and in the Florentine philosophical environment of the end of the Quattrocento. In the aftermath of the controversies between defenders of Plato and defenders of Aristotle, a quarrel brought by Greek and Byzantine intellectuals into Italy, (...) who exacerbated the differences between the two philosophers, there were also others who tried to show the essential concord between them, a purpose of which Pico’s treatise is one of the most expressive and relevant documents, seeking to prove the equivalence between Plato’s One and Aristotle’s Being. (shrink)

The MV-algebra S m w is obtained from the (m+1)-valued ukasiewicz chain by adding infinitesimals, in the same way as Chang's algebra is obtained from the two-valued chain. These algebras were introduced by Komori in his study of varieties of MV-algebras. In this paper we describe the finitely generated totally ordered algebras in the variety MV m w generated by S m w . This yields an easy description of the free MV m w -algebras over one generator. We characterize (...) the automorphism groups of the free MV-algebras over finitely many generators. (shrink)

I have only two comments to make, both of which will appear incidental at first. Their full relevance to the paper you have just read will become clear at the end, as I hope.The first refers to Harris's remark that Jacobi, Schleiermacher and Herder “make strange bedfellows”. Actually, they do not. This is one more example, I believe, of Hegel's usual idiosyncratic yet conceptually sound classification of philosophers and philosophies. I am thinking especially of the Jacobi-Herder pair, but I suspect (...) that what I have to say would apply to the third member of the trio as well. We must remember that, at the time of the writing of the Preface to the Phenomenology, the 1815 edition of Jacobi's dialogue David Hume on Faith, which Jacobi himself had overseen, did not exist. It is the edition that we are most likely to have read, because the wonders of photomechanical reproduction have made it easily available. Hegel, however, could only have read the dialogue in its 1787 edition, without the long new Introduction which Jacobi added in 1815 as an introduction to his collected works as well. (shrink)

We discuss the meaning of “being alive” and “being dead.” Our primary aim is to pave the way for a sound and accurate ethical debate concerning these two concepts. In particular, we analyze a metabolic approach and a genetic one and discuss the reasons for their failure to constitute a good starting point for successive debates. We argue that any ethical or social discussion of topics involving life and death must introduce cultural constructs such as, on the one hand, the (...) concept of clinical death and, on the other hand, the concept of existence. We argue that these two cultural constructs, although consistent with biomedical knowledge, cannot be ontologically grounded in it. To conclude, we apply our findings to the case of human embryos. (shrink)

Hegel and the Challenge of Spinoza explores the powerful continuing influence of Spinoza's metaphysical thinking in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century German philosophy. George di Giovanni examines the ways in which Hegel's own metaphysics sought to meet the challenges posed by Spinoza's monism, not by disproving monism, but by rendering it moot. In this, di Giovanni argues, Hegel was much closer in spirit to Kant and Fichte than to Schelling. This book will be of interest to students and (...) researchers interested in post-Kantian Idealism, Romanticism, and metaphysics. (shrink)

Born from the combination of two projects--a presentation of the important essays from the Critical Journal of Schelling and Hegel that were still untranslated and an anthology of excerpts from the works of the generation of German thinkers ...

The theologians of the late German Enlightenment saw in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason a new rational defence of their Christian faith. In fact, Kant's critical theory of meaning and moral law totally subverted the spirit of that faith. This challenging new study examines the contribution made by the Critique of Pure Reason to this change of meaning. George di Giovanni stresses the revolutionary character of Kant's critical thought but also reveals how this thought was being held hostage to (...) unwarranted metaphysical assumptions that caused much confusion and rendered the First Critique vulnerable to being reabsorbed into modes of thought typical of Enlightenment popular philosophy. Amongst the striking features of this book are nuanced interpretations of Jacobi and Reinhold, a lucid exposition of Fichte's early thought, and a rare, detailed account of Enlightenment popular philosophy. (shrink)

An International Fichte Congress was held at the Friedrich-Schiller-Universitat in Jena, September 26 to October 1, 1994, under the auspices of the Internationale Johann-Gottlieb-Fichte-Gesellschaft, in celebration of the 200th anniversary of the Wissenschaftslehre. Participants came from all corners of Eastern and Western Europe, Canada, Japan, and the United States. Well over one hundred papers were read on all aspects of Fichte’s philosophy and Fichte’s heritage. Among the participants from North America some were well known faces from the HSA, such as (...) Daniel Breazeale, George di Giovanni, Tom Rockmore, Jere Surber, and Michael Vater. They all made presentations. An excursion to Weimar proved an enjoyable diversion from the otherwise strict discipline of Fichtean science. (shrink)

Moving from the paradigms of “mentalization” and “reflective function”, this article develops the concept of “mentalizing” in organizations, understood as a process of construction of shared meaning in the work contexts, and whose absence or deterioration produces suffering in organizational experience, exposing individuals to significant psychosocial risks. This model converges in outlining a framework in which the absence of a reflective competence and the lack of symbolization of the experience of work fall on the perception of one's own job, and (...) on the relationship with colleagues and management, producing unsustainability of the work experience. The availability of reflective spaces that are inscribed in the ordinary dimension of work thus appears as a solution capable of promoting organizational well-being. (shrink)

In a transcendental argument, a judgement ≫S is P≪ is unpacked into the two reflective claims: ≫I say that S is P≪, and ≫What I say is indeed the case≪; and the truth of the second is made to rest on the authority of the ≫I say≪ of the first. The argument has all the features of a testimony, where the reliability of the testimony (as in juridical cases) depends on the extent to which, in being rendered, it conforms to (...) stipulated canons of objectivity. As presented in 1804, Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre can be interpreted as a protracted argument of this kind, inasmuch as, since its avowed subject-matter, the One, is ex hypothesi ineffable, its validity as a narrative about it depends solely on its internal logic as narrative. Such a narrative can only be one which, in constructing any schema about its transcendent subject-matter, at the same time de-constructs it: in the course of this process it methodically and exhaustively uncovers the genesis of otherwise merely accepted facts of experience, manifesting them for what they truly are (a disappearing appearing), and also allowing the necessarily unspoken evidence of the One to shine through (at least, for those willing to freely give themselves over to the discipline of Fichte’s Science). The Wissenschaftslehre 1804 is a type of apophantic theology. It is a Spinozism, but one developed from the standpoint of a finite subject who knows that he exists in a universe where, in truth, there is no explainable room for finitude. (shrink)

Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason is a key element of the system of philosophy which Kant introduced with his Critique of Pure Reason, and a work of major importance in the history of Western religious thought. It represents a great philosopher's attempt to spell out the form and content of a type of religion that would be grounded in moral reason and would meet the needs of ethical life. It includes sharply critical and boldly constructive discussions on topics (...) not often treated by philosophers, including such traditional theological concepts as original sin and the salvation or 'justification' of a sinner, and the idea of the proper role of a church. This volume presents it and three short essays that illuminate it in new translations by Allen Wood and George di Giovanni, with an introduction by Robert Merrihew Adams that locates it in its historical and philosophical context. (shrink)

Despite the radically different interests that motivate Emil Fackenheim’s and Henry Harris’s respective interpretations of Hegel, the two have significant points of commonality. They in fact come the closest precisely at points where they seem to differ most. The need and the possibility of ‘reconciliation’ is the theme that animates both interpretations, and both also agree in their assessment of Hegel’s treatment of ‘evil.’ There are nevertheless crucial differences separating the two, which the essay details. The essay concludes wondering, on (...) the one hand, how seriously Harris recognizes that, in a post-Holocaust world, ‘reconciliation’ calls for existential conditions such as Hegel could never have imagined; and on the other hand, how much Fackenheim would be willing to admit that his immersion into history will necessarily bring violent consequences in train for which there will have to be an accounting. (shrink)